We Talk to Everybody

For some, Linux represented the on-ramp to a life of hacking
on the open-source operating system. For others, Linux represented
a momentary opportunity to explore interesting, non-trivial
software development work. It was in this latter group that Drew
Eckhardt found himself as an 18-year-old CS student at the
University of Colorado. Like other Linux hackers, Drew was not
satisfied with Bill Jolitz's BSD work, and the attraction to a
freely redistributable UNIX system proved irresistible. He told
me,

I wanted to run some free UNIX on my hardware.
Since I didn't like what Bill Jolitz was doing, that meant
Linux.

Drew's first problems with his new Linux system led to his
first contribution to Linux development. “I was too impatient to
wait for someone to fix these problems (boot blocks that didn't
work, disk driver problems), and solutions ... weren't too
difficult,” he says. “Farther on, I continued to contribute to
the Linux kernel because it was fun.”

Drew spent most of his time as a “Linux developer” working
on the SCSI subsystem. But he is no longer involved in the
development end of Linux. “Developing for the Linux kernel and
user lands would be too close to what I do at work,” he says. The
little UNIX hacking Drew has done on his own recently has tended to
be FreeBSD.

While Drew emphasizes that the size of the Linux community of
hackers was one of the best things about it, he doesn't think there
is anything too revolutionary about the way Linux was developed. He
suggests,

In hindsight, the development effort wasn't too
different from commercial environments where developers hide in
their offices, work on some subsystem and release the code as
certain functions are completed.

Drew may not play much of a role in future Linux development
(he is a software engineer for a company that builds digital video
servers for broadcast and post-production). But his thoughts on the
future of proprietary software vs. open-source systems do reveal a
future for Linux. He says,

In niche markets, we'll always have proprietary
software because those markets can't or won't fund new products,
and software companies can't guarantee they'll sell the support
needed to pay for development after the fact. In the general
consumer market, its days may be numbered ... buying shrink-wrapped
proprietary software is a bit silly when you can get the same
software on a CD-Recordable for a dollar.

Drew Eckhardt's e-mail address is drew@poohsticks.org.

Rik Faith

Some people find Linux, stay for awhile and then part ways.
And others? Well, for some, when it comes to Linux, once you hack,
you'll never go back.

Rik Faith is currently working with Precision Insight and, as
such, gets to spend all of his work time “using and improving”
Linux. Says Rik,

The popularity of Linux and the willingness of
vendors to pay for Linux improvements (both in the kernel and in
user space) have enabled me to find what is very nearly my ideal
job: I can work at home, use Linux all the time, and get paid for
improving Linux and XFree86.

Rik first discovered Linux while toiling away in graduate
school. He had been working on his Ph.D when he heard “rumors
about a free UNIX” in late 1991. All the same, it wasn't until
spring of the following year that Rik actually downloaded the
source code and booted it up. As Rik remembers, “it booted fine
from floppy and was able to see my old 40MB drive, but it didn't
support my Future Domain SCSI controller.”

And this is when Rik Faith's inner penguin started
singing.

I ordered a manual for the Future Domain chip
set, and as soon as finals were over, I started to write a SCSI
device driver. After about three days, I was convinced that this
was too difficult for me. But on the fourth day, I had a working
SCSI driver!

And by the end of the month, Rik's hack was fully
interrupt-driven and ready for Linux 0.97.

In addition to his work on the Future Domain SCSI driver, Rik
also worked on the APM driver, and later did kernel work on the
Direct Rendering Interface (DRI) as an engineer with Precision
Insight. And like some of the other original kernel hackers, Rik
has been involved in a number of non-kernel Linux projects. These
include maintenance of the util-linux collection and coordination
of the man page project—both of which have since been taken over
by Andries Brouwer, another of the original Linux hackers. Rik even
worked on his own Linux distribution, BOGUS Linux, with colleagues
Kevin Martin and Doug Hoffman. “The BOGUS Linux release was the
first Linux distribution to use the `pristine source plus patches'
paradigm that is now familiar to all RPM users,” Rik notes.

All this nonstop Linux work has kept Rik exceptionally busy
over the years. In fact, he says,

I found that I had to cut back on my Linux work
for a few years while I finished my Ph.D and started a family—my
wife, Melissa, and I have two daughters, Rhiannon (4 years) and
Selena (7 months) ... For fun, I spend time with my wife, play with
my kids, and work on free software to format, search and serve
human-language dictionaries.

Rik Faith's e-mail address is faith@alephnull.com. Visit his
work with “human-language dictionaries” at
http://www.dict.org/.